Member-only story
Liberation
How positive actions for their own sake set us free
When I was very young, sometime back in the late Cretaceous when I’d occasionally play with a lonely pterosaur, I used to think that human relationships ought to be somewhat reciprocal. Sure, no relationship can be perfectly balanced even for a moment or two, and certainly not over longer duration (think: half an hour or more). But 45:55, 40:60, even 35:65 seemed reasonable and achievable and, I presumed in my naïve long-ago youth, the kind of thing I ought to be aiming for.
Slowly, over the course of eons, as the Grand Canyon was carved into orange-red rock by the forces of erosion and as the Alps rose higher and higher from what had formerly been the Tethys Sea, I discovered the error of my ways.
As I began to formulate for myself the fundamental tenets of evolutionary psychology I came to realize that men live in a particular kind of mental world shaped by the forces of selection pressure. The male brain is adapted to see relationships in a certain way because for more than 95% of our evolutionary history this certain kind of way was highly adaptive.
Imagine, gentle reader, we’re standing together in silent companionship on the African savannah 70,000 years ago. What do we see? A group of males aged between fifteen and twenty-five, armed with pointed sticks…
